Vehicular Micro Clouds as Virtual Edge Servers for Efficient Data Collection

Automakers have already started rolling out cars with communication capabilities. They become more than simple means of transportation - their mobility combined with networking lets them interconnect people and machines. Looking at the network part, the most important aspect is to make the underlying network scaleable. Mobile edge computing has been introduced in 4G networks to achieve such scalability using caches and processing capabilities at eNodeBs, i.e., at the edge of the network. We introduce the concept of vehicular micro clouds as virtual edge servers. Micro clouds are conceptually clusters of cars, which help aggregating collected data that is transferred to some backend. In contrast to previous work on dynamic clustering in vehicular networks, we investigate the construction of such micro clouds using a map based approach.